"The first class we had together you said 'don't worry, you'll do fine, just pretend nobody's looking at you' and Jiang Cheng said 'don't get his hopes up' and you said 'I know what I'm talking about,' not those exact words but it was something like that.

And you were right. I spent three hours explaining math to prove it to him and myself but you were right."

"I hid in the bushes once and watched him do archery. He's the best archer among the teenagers. Maybe the entire enclave." 

"...wow."

That doesn't really feel like enough, but it's what she's got.

"But he can't kill things and he can't do it front of people so it doesn't matter."

She feels like it matters any but it's hard to dispute that it matters much.

"Yeah," she says instead. "It's... still something I'm glad I know, I think." 

"Maybe he can just be on that drug that makes you not scared all the time. The nurse could prescribe it to him."

That sounds like four different kinds of dangerous and ill-advised but she's not going to say so. "Maybe. I feel like I don't know enough about drugs to recommend doing anything in particular with them but presumably the nurse does."

"I mean normally they don't recommend it because uh you kind of need being scared to not die but..."

"Chemistry isn't very good at only taking away specific kinds of scared, I think, but I sort of wonder if Xichen could do something? ...but that would only last so long because he's a junior, so."

"I mean, someone else could learn to cast it, if it helped-- I really shouldn't do problem-solving while I'm drunk."

"This is true. And I probably shouldn't be aiding or abetting you doing problem-solving while drunk."

"Instead you should be aiding and abetting me in misbehavior!"

"...sure. Let's go with that." 

"This is my room! Bye!"

"Bye! See you tomorrow morning." 

And now she's done, finally, for real, and there have been no international incidents and she was good enough at time management that there's still eight minutes left before curfew, so she'll call the night a success. 

The next morning at Shanghai table there are five miserable freshmen and one extremely cheerful freshman. 

"Last night was great!" Wei Wuxian says loudly. 

"Shut up."

"I'm going to kill you."

"Why is everything so bright."

Masozi drank enough water once he was in his room that his head doesn't hurt too badly, but he's half falling asleep over his Mandarin notes and also not even slightly eating his food. The cafeteria food this morning all looks incredibly nauseating. 

Wen Ning is in pain too horrible to talk, which isn't that different from his normal state of affairs.

Lan Wangji drank some alcohol and then there was this black space in his memory and then he woke up in his bed the next morning. He's... pretty sure he didn't sexually assault Wei Ying? Because Wei Ying would-- okay, that's not true. Because Jiang Cheng would be very angry at him if he had. This still leaves a huge space of possible behaviors which Lan Zhan is far too afraid to ask about.

Oh no, Wen Ning looks sad? This is an unacceptable state of affairs! 

Masozi gets his plastic water bottle out of his backpack and gives it to Wen Ning. (He's vaguely aware that drinking water helps with the part where getting drunk gives you a sore head the next morning, because there was an old woman who lived in the makeshift hut next to his family's makeshift hut for a while, and she drank, and then in the mornings she would scream at anyone who made noise nearby and Masozi's mother would send one of the kids to walk to the nearest pump so they could bring her water to drink.) 

Wen Ning drinks the water gratefully.